If you’ve ever walked out of a room wondering which version of yourself just spoke, Audition is the novel that gently—then relentlessly—shows you why. It tackles the modern ache of performative living, where the line between your private self and your public role blurs until it vanishes.
Audition reveals that identity is an ongoing “audition”—we are always performing, watching ourselves perform, and trying to reconcile the gap between the role we’re cast in and the person we suspect we are.
Best for readers who love literary fiction about perception, performance, and the slipperiness of truth; not for those who need propulsive plot over psychological nuance.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Katie Kitamura’s Audition (Riverhead Books, April 8, 2025) is a compact, haunting novel set in contemporary New York, following a middle-aged actress whose life tilts when a younger man named Xavier insists he may be her son.
It opens not with thunder but with a slow, unnerving accumulation of glances, gestures, and rehearsals—the kind of “quiet interior narrative” that rewards attention and patience.
And from its first pages in the faceless restaurant to the mirrored structures later on, the book makes good on its title: everyone here is trying out a self. “Like an actor…shedding the skin of a role for which he had not been destined,” Audition whispers, announcing its project in miniature.
2. Background
Kitamura’s fourth novel arrives after A Separation (2017) and Intimacies (2021), both celebrated for crisp, clinical prose that conceals—then exposes—emotional dread.
Audition (208 pp.) was published by Riverhead on April 8, 2025; in the UK by Fern Press (192 pp.). It landed on “most anticipated” lists and later on prize lists (including the Booker).
Premise. The narrator—unnamed, observant, persistently self-questioning—meets Xavier for lunch, where his claim fractures her sense of reality and marriage. “No relationship between us can be possible,” she says, moments before her husband, Tomas, walks in and walks out.
3. Summary of Audition
An unnamed, middle-aged actress—our narrator—walks into a bright, impersonal restaurant in Manhattan’s financial district to meet a much younger man named Xavier. The setting is deliberately inhospitable: a table wedged between swinging kitchen doors and the bathroom corridor, a place chosen (she thinks) to make staying difficult and leaving easy.
Even before a word is spoken, she is staging herself, noticing how she looks through the “layers of glass and reflection,” already aware that she is both the one who acts and the one who watches herself act.
What makes the lunch uncanny is not just the age gap, or that the host cannot quite place the connection between them (“my age, above all. That was the thing that confounded him”), but the reason for the meeting itself: Xavier has asked to see her because he’s been circling her life for a while—drawn to her art, and to the rumor of relation.
The narrator tries to shut it down (“No relationship between us can be possible”), but Xavier says there is something he needs to tell her. Before he can, fate performs a cruel trick: her husband, Tomas, unexpectedly walks into the same restaurant, dripping rain from an umbrella, the very person whose steady presence could make this awkward scene evaporate or explode.
The narrator half-rises to wave him over, then freezes; the next minute lengthens into an existential beat in which she rehearses, in real time, the cascade of consequences that might follow if she lets the two men meet.
This early set piece establishes the novel’s central tension: identity as performance. The narrator will later say, in one of the book’s key statements, that onstage there can be moments when “the gap between my private and performed selves collapsed… there was only a single, unified self.” But that unity is fragile; offstage, she returns to the double vision of actor and watcher, mother and not-mother, wife and stranger.
After the restaurant, the lives of the three principal figures—narrator, Tomas, and Xavier—intertwine around a theater production called Rivers, written by Max and directed by Anne. Xavier becomes Anne’s assistant, then something like her right hand, fetching coffee with ritual tact and absorbing her rhythms so completely that the narrator can see the entire power dynamic in the way he carries a paper cup.
The theater proves to be Audition’s laboratory: a place where attention moves across a room the instant Xavier enters, where Anne jokes they look “the perfect mother and son.” The joke is not neutral; it both teases and tests a boundary that the book will keep pressing.
While Rivers is finding its tone, the narrator monologues about acting and about a different production where an aging film star’s “authentic” confusion—his inability to memorize lines—was preserved and praised.
The director explained how cue-notes were taped everywhere on set so the camera could capture the man’s real bewilderment; the performance worked because the audience desired representation of pain, not pain itself. This show-within-the-show becomes the book’s ethical reference point: spectatorship can be tender or predatory, and authenticity can be a kind of exploitation.
As rehearsals harden into a run, Rivers becomes an unlikely phenomenon. The engagement extends three times; tickets sell out instantly; reviews verge on rapture. The narrator, who had once doubted the writing, now feels the part’s “endless depth,” especially the hinge where the first half flips into the second.
Every night she steps into a pool of light not knowing which version of the role will greet her; each performance feels genuinely contingent.
Success lifts the household, and it also re-positions Xavier: Tomas toasts his progress at a celebratory dinner, conceding pride even as he is warier than his wife about Xavier’s choices.
The book’s mid-sections are steeped in domestic choreography. The couple’s apartment is cleaned and re-fitted for Xavier’s extended stay; what was once a teenage mess turns into an oddly provisional guest room, then a semi-permanent base.
The narrator, who is both moved and unsettled, recognizes how swiftly the old family pattern seems to re-assert itself—“the three of us,” as it used to be—yet the very speed of the re-assembly makes her suspicious of how much is being scripted by memory and desire.
Soon, a fourth character arrives: Hana, Xavier’s girlfriend (or companion), whose presence tilts the balance.
Tomas, who had fretted about enabling, becomes oddly servile, ferrying trays of champagne and charcuterie to the living room while the young pair colonize the space like a set they are dressing: clothes and cables everywhere, Hana crouched at a desk “in animal fashion,” writing with ferocious focus; Xavier, often idle, sprawled on the sofa with a magazine.
The narrator watches this annexation with fascinated alarm; she notices Hana’s perfect manners and the little points scored in a kitchen at dawn, and she sees—in herself—a performance of graciousness that is both real and barbed.
What follows is a slow-burn domestic siege. Hana and Xavier more or less move into the living room; Tomas reorganizes his dignity around service; the narrator oscillates between maternal yearning and corrosive jealousy.
A key image captures the shift: Tomas, once preoccupied with his poise, begins to slump, to shuffle, to avoid eye contact; when Hana scolds him for rattling dishes, he murmurs an apology and “suddenly looked like an old man.”
The narrator experiences a “surge of wild anger.” Xavier, sensing the lever he has over both household attention and household labor, turns a champagne flute and an insolent hip wiggle into requests—then commands—for crackers; Tomas, humiliated, brings them.
Audition edges into outright farce—and then into violence contained within decorum. One night the narrator discovers that Hana has decamped and returned; she stumbles on Tomas and Xavier, mid-search, their faces “ringed with guilt,” a pillow in Xavier’s hand like a prop from a raid.
Within minutes, the scene shifts again: laughter, a study closet, Hana tumbling out as if they are playing a game in Tomas’s private room, the trio screeching, Tomas transformed into a court jester. Watching from the far end of the corridor, the narrator sees a tableau in which her home is no longer hers.
At last, the narrator acts. The novel’s most kinetic passage shows her yanking Tomas up so he bangs his head; then she drags Hana down the corridor and out the door. Hana, shockingly, complies—“bizarrely insubstantial… as if she had been waiting for this moment”—and even seems to regard the narrator with pity before vanishing into the stairwell. The door swings shut; the emptiness gapes; Xavier barrels back into the apartment demanding to know what she has done.
She insists that Hana “knew she needed to go,” but both of them understand that the pretense of equilibrium is over: “It had to end,” she tells Xavier, as the three stand in the hall awaiting the confrontation they can no longer defer.
What ends, exactly? Not just the living arrangement. The narrator describes what follows as a break in the spell: a realization, shared by both her and Xavier, that the script they’ve been collaborating on—one that named the three of them a family of a certain shape—has run out of lines. “We had been playing parts,” she says with brutal lucidity; once the complicity is stretched too long, “there is less give,” and the whole enterprise collapses.
Xavier, half-laughing, half-moaning, gathers his things in a bag; he looks at them and says, “It couldn’t last,” then leaves. The apartment becomes vast and silent; regret pools.
The run of Rivers limps to its finale. The narrator, once electrified by the nightly transformation, is now merely “going through the motions,” wringing the thing dry but still missing its absence when it’s over. In these emptied days, she deduces that Tomas and Xavier have stayed in touch; she does not begrudge it.
The question hanging in the air is not reconciliation but “reconstitution”: can a story be rewritten with the same players but different roles? Is there a way to unspool a narrative in both directions, forward and backward, to undo and redo at once?
The novel lets those questions hover.
A month later, Xavier returns with a bundle of pages. The object is not a peace offering so much as a proposition: a manuscript that Tomas instinctively reaches toward, then—sensing authorship and audience—hands to the narrator. It is, Xavier says, “a play”—more precisely, a monologue “for a woman of your age and general disposition, a woman who can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not real.”
Desire and appetite, long sublimated in the narrator’s restraint, flash into the open; she hears the greed in her own voice as she asks “What kind of part?” and recognizes, with a sharp internal click, that she had misunderstood Xavier. Whatever else he is (or is not), he is now an artist with a coherent ego and a capacity to make work.
The Ending Explained
The final pages fold stage and life together one last time. The narrator stands onstage “in the story he has created, in the role he has made,” speaking a chain of words “sturdy as a cable,” in front of a house that is full—the kind of crowd Xavier always wanted, the kind she once needed to confirm she existed.
She articulates the paradox of theater: the meaning produced is both entirely real as experienced and also the artifact of craft, of choices that “cede freedom.” She knows what Xavier seeks (recognition), and she knows it fades.
For now, she accepts the darkness at the edge of the stage, the voices that aren’t hers that nevertheless become her voice. Audition closes with her performing his text and acknowledging both its reality and its artificiality.
That is the answer to “what becomes of them”: they do not resolve a biological claim (the narrator has repeated, flatly, “I have never had a child, I don’t have children”), nor do they restore the family triad as it was. Instead, they create a work.
The relationship reconstitutes as collaboration, not kinship—a mutual consent to perform a version of the story where the roles are coherent and the terms are public. In earlier chapters, the narrator describes how the stage can produce a fleeting unity of self; the ending embodies that insight. In life they failed to keep the roles stable; in art, they agree to the script.
Key Plot Beats
- The first audition (Restaurant 1): The narrator meets Xavier; she tries to sever ties (“No relationship… can be possible”) even as her husband’s sudden arrival threatens to expose a connection she cannot yet name. The scene underlines how much of living is blocking and counter-blocking: who sits, who waves, who joins.
- Theater as classroom: At rehearsals for Rivers, Xavier moves into Anne’s orbit with extraordinary competence; the narrator watches her own visibility dim and flare depending on context. Anne’s quip—“perfect mother and son”—lands like a casting call.
- Art and exploitation: The embedded tale of the aging actor (and the earlier film Salvation) refracts the novel’s ethics: audiences often want the look of suffering. The story primes us to see how the household will stage “authenticity” as well.
- Success and hinge: Rivers takes off; the narrator thrills to a nightly transformation that never repeats the same way twice. At dinner, Tomas praises Xavier’s progress but shows caution about Xavier’s choices, signaling a father-son dynamic that will intensify.
- Home re-opened: Xavier moves back “home,” and the narrator recognizes the way space encodes role. The outsize glass desk Tomas buys is both ridiculous and, soon enough, naturalized by the clutter of books; eventually we learn Xavier has been writing at odd hours.
- Hana’s arrival & the living-room occupation: With Hana in place, the apartment becomes a stage where the older generation performs service and the younger pair perform youth, love, and creative self-making. Tomas’s deference—his posture, the way he shuffles, the humiliation that “suddenly” makes him look old—provokes the narrator’s fury.
- The push that doesn’t happen: Watching Tomas carry a plate toward the living room, the narrator imagines how little it would take—“one push”—to send him tumbling. She does not do it. The thought marks a moral brink the novel refuses to sensationalize.
- Game in the study; pity at the door: The farcical “raid” with the pillow, Hana tumbling out of the closet, Tomas reduced to a “jester.” Moments later, the narrator physically removes Hana; Hana’s look of pity is Audition‘s most devastating mirror.
- The break: Xavier gathers his things, voicing what both know—“It couldn’t last”—and leaves. The narrator recognizes the artifice they colluded in; the mechanism of story fails when the roles can no longer be sustained.
- After the curtain: Rivers ends; the apartment swells with absence. A month later, Xavier returns with a manuscript. It is a monologue written for the narrator, about a woman who can’t tell real from not real. He has become himself—an artist—just as she once became herself on stage.
- Final performance: The narrator stands before a full house, speaking words “given to me,” acknowledging that performance is the space where two minds can superimpose without canceling each other. In that overlap, something like truth flickers—real and made, both.
In one sentence: Audition is the story of a woman who briefly re-casts her life to include a young man as a son, only to watch the roles collapse at home and reassemble onstage, where, speaking a text he has written for her, she consents to a version of the relationship that art can hold and life could not.
4. Audition Analysis
4.1 Audition Characters
The narrator is all awareness: an artist who knows that life bleeds into performance. “There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it.”
Xavier, intense and eerily adaptable, learns how to play roles—assistant, protégé, son—until the performance feels real to everyone around him. “He was absorbed by the role of the assistant…just as he had presumably studied the part of my long-estranged son.”
Tomas, the husband, is the novel’s aching counterpoint: his silence in that restaurant detonates trust. “You’re not cheating on me again, are you?” he asks later, gently but irrevocably.
Anne (director) and Max (playwright) frame the theater’s power dynamics, while Josie and Clarice—the actors the narrator observes—mirror the book’s obsession with competitive intimacy and professional kinship.
The ensemble’s chemistry is electric in small exchanges: the starburst of longing when Xavier returns to the theater; the uneasy triangulation when Anne joins post-show dinners; the fragile rope of marriage fraying after a single misread lunch.
4.2 Audition Themes and Symbolism
Performance vs. Self is Audition’s axial theme. The narrator describes a moment on stage when “the gap between my private and performed selves collapsed…there was only a single, unified self.” For a breath, art makes authenticity possible.
Yet Kitamura undercuts purity by showing how performance also protects us from the “thing itself”: we want representations of pain, not pain. The novel’s embedded story about an aging film actor—his lines taped around the set, his confusion filmed and acclaimed—lays bare the ethics of spectatorship. “You are looking at a man lost…you don’t want to see actual pain…but its representation.”
Motherhood—both its presence and its absence—becomes a performance too. The narrator’s insistence, “I have never had a child, I don’t have children,” meets Xavier’s steady politeness, complicating the truth that not-having is also an event with its own weight.
Critics have noted that Audition doubles its reality in Part Two: a mirrored narrative that revises the mother–son claim and pushes readers to ask whether life is lived or narrated into being.
That structure aligns with Kitamura’s interview remarks about contradictions and our dwindling cultural tolerance for them—Audition, she suggests, trains us to hold two possibilities at once.
5. Audition Evaluation
1) Strengths: what works (and why it feels so good).
The prose is immaculate—clear, cold, and edged with heat. Scenes arrive as if viewed through glass, then suddenly fog with breath. The restaurant sequence is textbook Kitamura: “I saw Tomas enter the restaurant…he carried an umbrella and carefully shook the water off it,” while the narrator tries to decide whether to wave him over or vanish.
The theater material has documentary intensity; ideas about acting are dramatized, not lectured. The book’s most moving passage might be the aging screen actor’s “authentic” confusion turned into award-bait, a set covered in cue notes—an ethical knot Kitamura refuses to untie.
And the sentences hum with aphoristic intelligence: “There are always two stories taking place at once,” the narrator says; later, marriage topples “like a statue” when the wrong rope gets pulled.
2) Weaknesses: where a reader might bounce.
Some will find the pacing glacial and the interiority relentless—this is a book of refracted glances and ethical riddles more than of cliffhangers; several reviewers called it a “slow-burn” performance piece.
Others may bristle at the deliberate ambiguity in the novel’s second half; the doubled reality will feel, to plot-first readers, like a provocation rather than an answer.
3) Impact: what stayed with me.
I kept hearing the line about the “single, unified self” each time I left a meeting and winced at my own performance. The novel lodged in my life the way a good rehearsal does—making ordinary gestures feel staged, then newly alive.
4) Comparison with similar works.
If you loved the disquiet of Intimacies, the dissolved marriage in A Separation, or the eerie identity riddles in Javier Marías’s The Infatuations, Audition sits comfortably beside them—minimalist in style, maximal in implication.
5) Adaptation
Adaptation status. A film adaptation is in development, with Lulu Wang attached to direct and Lucy Liu and Charles Melton set to star; production partners include Laika and Higher Ground. No release date or box-office figures yet.
6. Personal Insight
We live in an era of performed selves—feeds, timelines, “stories.” Students and professionals alike rehearse identities hourly; Audition gives language for why the rehearsal is exhausting and, paradoxically, where grace might be found when performance and person briefly align. In that sense, it’s a superb text for seminars on media literacy, theater studies, and ethics.
For a philosophical bridge, Sartre’s account of bad faith—performing a role to evade responsibility for freedom—pairs sharply with Kitamura’s actress who knows the score and yet longs for unity. See this clear primer on Being and Nothingness, which links performance to the gaze and self-deception.
For cultural context and current reception data points—awards, readership signals, author background—consult the Booker Prizes author/library pages and Riverhead’s/public listings.
For adjacent, high-quality literary coverage and reading-guide style discourse, these resources distill critical consensus and classroom discussion prompts.
7. Conclusion
Audition is a compact master class in how to stage—and unstage—the self. It’s the rare novel that understands the ethics of looking, the seduction of being looked at, and the loneliness that lingers after the curtain falls.
For readers of literary fiction who crave psychological nuance, theater-world texture, and formally audacious storytelling—especially fans of Rachel Cusk, Javier Marías, and Kitamura’s own Intimacies—this is essential.
As a final reflection, Audition matters now because it names how we live: in roles, in refrains, in mirrors. The miracle it offers is that brief, shimmering minute when performance and person briefly become one—and show us who we might be.
